Here's where to find the most up-to-date flight safety information
Just this month, the collision of an American Airlines plane and a US Army helicopter killed 67 people in Washington, DC, and a Delta Airlines flight crash-landed in Toronto. In 2024, the year started off with a door panel blowing off an Alaska Airlines flight, and then months later there eventually would be two fatal crashes involving South Korean and Azerbaijani airlines.
Though airplane accidents are still a rarity, according to the numbers.
Arnold Barnett, a professor of statistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, co-authored an August 2024 airline safety study that between 2018 and 2022, the worldwide death risk per boarding was one in 13.7 million.
But for anxious flyers, having all this information may not alleviate a fear of flying. In fact, it might do the opposite and could even influence panic symptoms at the airport, Jonathan Bricker, an affiliate psychology professor at the University of Washington told CNN.
'The anxious mind is never satisfied with the answer, the data,' Bricker said. 'It's always looking for more information to reassure itself, because it will think of another possibility.'
And it can be overwhelming to parse through the different agencies and data points on airline safety. The Federal Aviation Administration under the Department of Transportation regulates civilian aviation, but the National Transportation Safety Board investigates all major civil aviation accidents.
Both the FAA and NTSB have troves of data to browse but much of the language is industry-specific. NTSB posts preliminary data on the number of accidents here (as the chart appears, it suggests there was a record-low number of airplane accidents nationwide in January). The NTSB also maintains an accident database, and the FAA has a landing page for its different set of flight safety data and information.
If you're open to gaining more knowledge, experts point to Airline Ratings, which offers detailed and reliable safety assessments about individual airlines, though it doesn't calculate risk.
The site rates airlines on whether they have had numerous and serious pilot-related incidents, passed all of their major audits (for American Airlines that includes benchmarks such as International Air Transport Association audits and FAA bans) and if they had any fatal crashes in the last 10 years.
Barnett also pointed to Air Safety Network for details on individual crashes. For example, the site posts the flight path, images, coordinates, maps and information from news sources and social media posts for the Delta flight that rolled over in Toronto Pearson.
Kristy Kiernan, an associate professor at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, told CNN that the Flight Safety Foundation's 'Skybrary' has valid and reliable information. It's like a Wikipedia for industry knowledge, describing different accident types and what aircrafts can expect in those situations.
'As an industry we want to make sure that people have the resources that they need in order to understand something in layman's terms,' Kiernan said, contradicting the position of Bricker, the psychology professor. 'If you learn about all of the processes and procedures that are in place in the aviation system to keep you safe, you'll feel a lot more comfortable.'
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